Finding your breakthrough idea | Dorie Clark | TEDxBeaconStreet

Translator: Maria Isabel Menendez-Leon Reviewer: Peter van de Ven So, you're here today because you believe in the power of ideas.

In fact, that's the whole premise of Ted.

The raison d'être is: "Ideas worth spreading."

We live today in what you could argue is a Golden Age of ideas.

Last year, 1.3 million books were published.

500 million tweets are sent each and every day.

In the last minute, a hundred hours of videos were uploaded to YouTube.

But, amidst all of this plenty, there's a lot of noise.

How do you create something that lasts?

How do you create an idea that has meaning?

How do you create an idea that breaks through?

This is a gentleman named Eric Schadt.

Today he runs a major research center at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

He's published 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

Everything from Alzheimer's disease, to obesity, to diabetes, and in between.

But, it wasn't always that way.

Eric actually didn't start out in biology.

He was a computer science major, as an undergraduate.

He got his master's degree in pure mathematics.

So, when he decided to go back and get his doctorate in biomathematics, he already saw the world in a slightly different way than a lot of his colleagues.

In fact, in the late 1990s, a whole generation of new technology was being developed which allowed for the rapid sequencing of DNA and RNA.

This was transformative in the world of biology because it meant that the tasks that would have taken an individual scientist literally years to do, to study a gene, could be done almost overnight.

Eric was eager to go all in.

He was comfortable with math, he was comfortable with data, he was comfortable with the kinds of quantitative methods that were necessary to study things in this way.

But, he faced a huge amount of resistance.

And, in fact, as he progressed, as he started writing papers and doing his research and applying big data to the world of biology, he faced so much pressure.

Literally, tenured professors at Ivy League universities would storm out of his lectures and say, "Don't listen to this guy."

Now, today things have changed.

Eric is widely recognized as one of the most innovative scientists in the world.

He's been profiled in the New York Times, he's been written up twice in Esquire.

But, what this teaches us is that real innovation very rarely comes from the center.

It's very rare that innovation comes from people who have been trained doing the same things in a guild-like way as generations before them.

It's hard to see the world in a new way when you're doing things the same old way.

Rather, innovation usually comes from the edges, from the perimeter, from the periphery.

It comes from mixing different experiences and different backgrounds, bringing new perspectives to bear, just as Eric took his quantitative methods, from math and computer science, and is making a difference today in the lives of patients in the world of biology.

The question for you is how can you mix your own experiences and perspectives to be more innovative?

You may recognize this gentleman.

His name is Daniel Goleman, and he's the author of the seminal book "Emotional Intelligence."

It has been published in 40 languages; it sold five million copies.

Harvard Business Review called it "One of the most breakthrough management ideas in the 1990s."

Now, you might assume that Daniel Goleman is a researcher, and that he did the research and then wrote about it.

But, actually that's not the case.

He's a journalist.

And the way that he discovered the concept of emotional intelligence is that one day he was reading a psychology journal, and buried amidst the otherwise very boring prose in this psychology journal, he discovered the concept, these ideas,

that said that IQ, this thing we've been, for 50 years, measuring our lives by, measuring our prospects of future success, it's actually not all it's cracked up to be.

Instead, what we need to be looking at is emotional intelligence.

He thought that it was such an important powerful concept, he needed to shine light on it, he needed to bring it to the world.

And he did, and it changed the discourse.

But what's useful here, what I think is important for us to know, is the fact that he was reading a journal.

Now, you and I all read.

We read blog posts, we read emails, we read our Twitter feed, we might even read BuzzFeed.

(Laughs) But, these days it is very rare that we make time for the kind of sustained reflection that is necessary for breakthrough innovative ideas.

Reading a journal article, even reading a book, if we can make time for that, that gives us the space to come up with the ideas that can make a difference.

This is Rose Schumann.

She grew up in the suburbs of Maryland, and when she was 18 years old, she took a family trip to Nicaragua to visit her stepmother's family.

When she was down there, it was shortly after the end of the Contra War, and frankly, she wasn't really prepared for what she saw down there.

There was a huge amount of poverty, and there was one functioning streetlight in the nation.

She vowed then and there that she would make a career in international development.

And that's what she did.

She went to college, and she studied development, and she got a job working in NGOs after she graduated.

Like a lot of people, she began to think about this idea, this really critical question: How do you bring the Internet, the power of the Internet, to the world's poorest people?

Now, you probably heard lots of ideas, and they're good ones, about bringing laptops to the poor.

And that's important for a lot of people.

But, for the very poorest, the last billion, the hardest to reach, there's a lot of obstacles.

If you're going to give people laptops, they need electricity to power the laptops, they need a safe place to store the laptops, they need to be literate so they can operate the laptops.

They probably need to be literate in a language like English or French, or another major language group, because if they speak a small indigenous language, there's not going to be much information on the internet for them to find.

You do all that, you meet those conditions, and then, they might search, and then, they might find something.

Those are a lot of steps.

She thought: Isn't there any easier way?

Is there a way that we can do that better to cut out some of these steps?

So, one day she was walking around, and she noticed something.

She noticed a call box.

Now, this is something you probably see every day too, at a transit station or maybe on a college campus.

You just push a button and you can talk to somebody.

And she said: that's it!

She spent a feverish four hours writing down her ideas that would govern the next ten years of her professional life.

She founded an organization that created an item called the question box.

Today, it operates in India and in parts of Africa.

The question box literally is a type of call box where people who don't even understand the concept of the internet are able to push a button and ask a question to people that they're connected to, who are in a centralized, bilingual location, and they're on the internet looking up answers to questions that people ask.

It could be anything from crop prices, to Rose's favorite question, which is: "Did the Egyptian pyramids ever move?"

In Liberia, which is one of the countries where question box operates, devastated by the Ebola epidemic, a large percentage of the foreigners and NGOs that were present have left the country.

And meanwhile, 40% of Liberians 15 and older are illiterate.

It is very hard to get accurate and reliable information about what people can do to protect themselves and their families.

Question box is providing a lifeline in those communities, and it started because Rose was paying attention to her life, to her own experiences, that set her in a direction, and looking up, looking around, seeing the call box and realizing the connections that she could make to the problems she was trying to solve.

We could all pay a little more attention.

Finally, I want to talk to you about getting luckier.

This might seem like the ultimate oxymoron.

How can you get luckier? How do you make that happen?

This is a gentleman named Tony Chan.

He is the author of a book called "Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck," and it's a study of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs.

He surveyed thousands of them to try to figure out what makes them tick, what makes an entrepreneur successful, and it turns out it's these four categories that they fit into.

Some are governed by their heart, their passion.

Some are governed by their smarts, you know, their great brainpower.

Others are driven by guts, by their chutzpah.

We can all understand and appreciate that.

And, finally, there's luck.

Now, a full 25% of entrepreneurs in Tony Chan's study said that they were luck-driven.

That doesn't mean they're just slackers who good things happened to.

Luck, it turns out, is an attitude, an orientation, and it's something we can all cultivate.

You've probably been in cocktail parties where you're talking to someone, and they, you know, look at you and then they look over your shoulder looking for the next person, the better person to be talking to.

(Laughs) That's not what lucky people do.

Lucky people are more open to experiences, they're willing to step back, they're willing to talk to the wallflower, they're willing to talk to unlikely people, the cab driver, the passenger on the cruise ship, that ten years later might turn out to be just the person they need in their life.

It's about a humility, a curiosity and an openness to experience.

We could all stand to become a little luckier.

You see the world in a different way than anyone else.

Your vision is unique.

Mixing perspectives, making time for reflection, paying attention to yourself and to the world around you, and being luckier, having an attitude of luck.

You have something to say, you have a contribution to make, and the world needs you to do it.

It's time for your ideas to break through.

Thank you.

(Applause)